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| Unboxing the Rainbow Honey October Mystery Bag! |
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Zi
"Zi" is a magnificently regal purple shimmer nigh to bursting with iridescent microflakies twinkling in all the prismatic rainbow hues of a fairy ball. I haven't been able to figure out what "Zi" means, but if it were the term for magic incarnate in some lost fae language then that would be appropriate. Elusive shifting sparks of gold, silver, sapphire, aquamarine, topaz, fuchsia, peridot, pale emerald, and saphir rose scintillate in the violet amethyst base like a dance of dreams. I used three coats for the powerful full effect, though it was quite close after two. If you love purples, you absolutely positively cannot miss "Zi"; she is a rare gem.
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| Rainbow Honey "Zi" |
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| Rainbow Honey "Zi" |
If you saw my post on the Essence Dark Romance Collection, "Zi" may have reminded you of "Dark Light Starlight", an imperial iris purple shimmer also released this month (in the U.S., anyways). They both have beautiful kaleidoscopic microflakies, though those in "Dark Light Starlight" are much finer and more subtle. "Dark Light Starlight" also has a distinctly bluer, electric violet base, though the shimmer in both polishes has a predominant pink cast. Both are incredibly beautiful in unique ways, but even if you have "Dark Light Starlight" it really can't replace "Zi".
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| Rainbow Honey "Zi" // Essence "Dark Night Starlight" |
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| Rainbow Honey "Zi" // Essence "Dark Night Starlight" |
{Rainbow Honey Lab notes on "Zi" (5/15mL): A balanced purple lacquer packed with micro blue, gold, silver, and magenta glitters. Layer up for a deeper purple!}
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Café con Leche
"Café con Leche" is a gorgeous toasted marshmallow nude sparkling with precious microflakies of silver and gold, the silver having a slight rainbow iridescence that is both breathtaking and complex. "Café con Leche" has warm, slightly caramelized golden tones, and is so inexplicably cuddly that I am seized by the compulsion to go hug something. It is so perfect for the cozy seasons of autumn and winter, with a sprinkling of glamour and delight for the upcoming holidays. Like most shimmer nail polishes with this kind of fleck, both "Zi" and "Café con Leche" take a little time to dry so turn on a cute movie and relax with a cuppa while painting these on. "Café con Leche" was good to go in two coats!!
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| Rainbow Honey "Café con Leche" |
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| Rainbow Honey "Café con Leche" |
The word cuppa made me think of Butter London, and when I thought of Butter London my mind flashed to "Crumpet", and when I dug it out I was pleased that my subconscious is actually working today because the base color of "Crumpet" and "Café con Leche" are really quite similar. "Crumpet" might be a smidgen pinker, but if you love it on your skintone then you need to go get "Café con Leche" right meow.
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| Rainbow Honey "Café con Leche" // Butter London "Crumpet" |
{Rainbow Honey lab notes on "Café con Leche" (5/15mL): Almost named "Cortadito", "Café con Leche" is tribute to this delicious cuban-style espresso topped with steamed milk. It is a light creamy shade of brown, packed with micro gold and silver pigments. A perfect match for your coffeehouse timeout this fall!}
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L'Orange Ganache Nourishing Lip Balm
{Rainbow Honey notes on "L'Orange Ganache" (0.15oz): Our famous nourishing lip balm, a necessity for the season, is back in a delicious new flavor. L'Orange Ganache is a blend of sweet dried oranges and belgian dark chocolate! Enjoy this "treat" for Halloween!}
For years and years, my mom has stuffed a chocolate orange in my Christmas stocking, the kind where you bash it on the counter (or "SMASH IT WITH A HAMMER", if you're Yzma), and it cracks into a hundred little wedges of delightfulness. I think one year she wasn't able to find the oranges, and my brother and I were so devastated that every year since then she has hunted these down with the grim determination and mortal precision found only in grizzly bear mothers. And this lip balm smells EXACTLY like them! Like eating chocolate torte in the Court of the Oranges (a beautiful, very famous courtyard orange grove in the Great Mosque/Cathedral of Cordoba, Spain). This fragrance is the scent of my holidays, and also very fun and festive for Halloween :) I love the oblong shape of the balm; I could see it as being very adaptable to any lip shape.
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| Rainbow Honey "L'Orange Ganache" Nourishing Lip Balm |
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Sweet November: Rollerball Eau de Parfum & Shimmer Soap
Sniffing "Sweet November", my very first thought was that it was like a more sophisticated version of Bath & Body Work's infamous "Warm Vanilla Sugar", so I was very pleased with myself when I unearthed the Rainbow Honey note from the rubble of my frantic package opening and read:
{Rainbow Honey notes on "Sweet November" Eau de Parfum (4/12mL): a brand new fragrance by Rainbow Honey; "Sweet November" is a warm sweet musk, perfect for fall, with notes of coconut and vanilla sugar! Let us know what you think!
Rainbow Honey notes on "Sweet November" Shimmer Soap (14/90gr): A cleam, foamy hand-crafted shimmery body soap you can use all over! Let us know what you think!}
Well I think that it is delicious!! The warm vanilla cream scent, sprinkled with raw sugar, is laced with what smells to me like hazelnut but I suppose is coconut, and lightened by a powdery woodsy note; that will be the musk. I'm not one for musks, generally, but I think that is because they are deep and dark, like incense; if you're not a musky person either, never fear! The description of it as being warm and sweet is perfect; it's bright and high like powder, if that makes any sense at all, and makes me think of sunlight on acorns in an autumn woodland. This fragrance is the ideal complement to "Café con Leche"!
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| Rainbow Honey "Sweet November" Eau de Parfum & Shimmer Soap |
The rollerball eau de parfum leaves a soft, gentle kiss of fragrance, which is great for those who like elegent traces of scent but I could do with it being a bit stronger. Then again, I kind of want to throw myself in a vat of this stuff and just ruminate in it... so that's the crazy place where I'm at. I mentioned this in my review of the September Mystery Bag but didn't explain it very well: Rainbow Honey soap is fabulous. I really don't like normal, slippery bar soap that insists I chase it around the sink like a buttered seal, and then leaves my hands feeling stripped and tacky, but this is not like that at all. There is something about it like solidified gel that feels nice and moisturizing, and "Sweet November" in particular frothed and fluffed like the happiest bar of soap in the whole world. Plus, it has tiny gold SHIMMEH!! It's a polite shimmer- you won't be glowing like Midas- but if you press your face to your hand you can see a little tickle of glimmer magic :)
All Your Base
{Rainbow Honey lab notes on "All Your Base": Many of you have asked for the return of All Your Base and because you loved it so much, we added a full size sample of "all your base" to this month's lineup! Rainbow Honey's own base coat enriched with vitamin E, a must have first layer to every manicure!}
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| Rainbow Honey "All Your Base" base coat |
Well, there you have it! The people have spoken, and I am looking forward to living with their favorite base coat. Like most all vitamin or nutrient enriched base coats I have encountered, like any of the Essies, "All Your Base" has a slower drying time, but I do much prefer the wider RH brush and sleeker application compared to my comparable Essie base coats. And you heard the Lab- even the mini mystery bags get a full-size version of this base coat! That's pretty spectacular, actually! Though to keep the value up on the large mystery bag, Rainbow Honey has included an extra special treat...
...a nail art dotter!!
Woohoo! This is great! Mine has a twirly bright chlorophyll green swirl in the center, like a blade of grass doing a pirouette, and it is completely mesmerizing when it rolls across a tabletop... so there goes my afternoon. What I love about this dotter is that it has one very large dot end, and one much smaller on the other; both ends of the Essence dotter that I have are quite small, so this one allows for some more flexibility. And as you can see, I had great fun playing with it! For the occasion, I brought out my Rainbow Honey Robots in "Bitty Love Bot" and "Lucky Bot" <3
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| Rainbow Honey "Zi" + "Bitty Love Bot" |
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| Rainbow Honey "Café con Leche" + "Lucky Bot" |
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Rainbow Honey Mystery Bags are released monthly, and are available both on a subscription basis and individually. I compare a large and mini mystery bag in my August Mystery Bag post, though I strongly recommend the large bag. They retail for $25 (this one had a value of $50, not including the dotter) and may be purchased on the Rainbow Honey through the month of October and while supplies last through November. The best deal ever would be to get both the current and previous month's Mystery Bag, which as a $50 purchase would also earn you the Limited Edition of the Month, free! (And free shipping!!) I mean, just start throwing money at that point.
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| Rainbow Honey October Mystery Bag - new packaging |
Oh Rainbow Honey, I just love you so!! What do you think, do you need the October Mystery Bag? (That was kind of a trick question. The answer is yes, you do.)
Stay tuned for the October "Keep Believing" Limited Edition collection, and a few favorites from the Yokai collection!!!
XOXO
Marisa + Sprinklepuff
Oh my, Zi is magnificent! But you knew I'd say that, didn't you? ;) I don't usually go for sweet sugary scents but I love spice and like you I love to bask in a fragrance. If you like trying out perfumes, check out http://surrendertochance.com/ -- they sell decants of everything under the sun. Right now I'm sniffing up wafts of Geurlain's Mitsouko that I got from them, a fruity, powdery chypre with spicy rosy peach over oakmoss and woods. Delicious!
ReplyDeleteGreat review!
Haha actually, YES, I did!! I was thinking of you when I swatched Zi; it's like you predicted her when you said that "Dark Night Starlight" looked like an indie!!! O.o Zi really is magnificent. Even my boyfriend, who is patently sick of purples (because I have so many) said, and I quote: "That Zi polish is amazing. Like, I'm actually impressed. It's spectacular." :D Can you believe that someone commented on the Rainbow Honey page to say that they were disappointed in the "basic" purple and "basic" gold??! I was flabbergasted.
ReplyDeleteSurrender to Chance is heavenly, I'm going to have to show it to my auntie! She was a makeup artist and also a perfume connoisseur. I love fragrances, but my knowledge of them is not terribly sophisticated; what I lack in expertise I try to make up for with enthusiasm and earnest effort! :) Do you ever write fragrance reviews, Liz? Good ones are hard to find, and you would be brilliant!
My significant other, when presented with a polish that pleases his eye, likes to refer to it cryptically as having "The Look." He's a lot more expansive when he doesn't particularly like it, but always with some humorous reference to Liberace or food or military camouflauge colors or the like, so you can't really be mad.
DeleteThere will always be those who are disappointed, if only for the sake of being different from everyone else. It's a shame that they have to reveal their puny aesthetic by saying so, though.
Ah! I'm SO GLAD you have an aunt with a nose for fragrance, she must be a treasure! And she'll surely find many old favorites on Surrender to Chance. I don't have the nose to be a perfumista, but I do love reading about perfume and think that those who write about it are some of the best writers to be found. Such a complex thing, and they make it feel so easy! Takes my breath away on a regular basis. I thank you for that lovely compliment but I could never do what they do. If you're interested, here are two perfume blogs (actually written by at least three people each, who take turns posting) -- PerfumePosse.com, which is the one perfume blog I subscribe to although there are many worth reading, but this one I find easy to keep up with and I love the comments each post elicits, it has a huge following of very intelligent readers -- and PerfumeSmellinThings.com, another excellent blog with great writing and talkative knowledgeable readers. I tend to use this one more as a reference source. But on either one you'll find a list of other fragrance blogs and there ain't no duds in the bunch. If I could write the way these people do, I'd have graduated from college for one thing. *lol* Writing is hard! For a long time I lost my faith in the written word as having any capacity to unambiguously reflect the truth, and didn't so much as fill out a memo line on a check or sign a greeting card for years and years. I've only become more confident writing again since I started my polish blog, which was one of the reasons why I did it, and obviously it's helped but I don't think I'll be up to the speed of a perfume writer in this lifetime. ;)
Liz, it shocks me that you think so about writing! I'm at least as dumbfounded by it as about the "puny aesthetic" person (and yes, you're right, I'm sure she was just feeling cantankerous). One of the reasons that I'm so glad you found my blog (so that I could meet yours) is because I feel that Lacquer Slacker Liz has the most sophisticated polish prose I've yet seen on a beauty blog- seriously!!! I'm absolutely not just saying it. Perhaps it's because writing is such a soulful ideal for you :) You speak so beautifully, and with such precision! You're always making the kind of perfect statements that make me want to take notes :D Ack, college isn't for everyone though- I'm in my last year of architecture school, and I'm having a hard time with it right now. Not because I'm having a super hard term per se, but because I'm kinda just burned out and want a normal life again :P
DeleteOh! Now I'm sad that I put my RH subscription on hold. The Cafe con Leche is exactly the kind of nude color I've been looking for and a orange-chocolate lip balm? YES PLEASE! Plus a dotting tool that actually has a noticeable difference between the dot sizes? Ahhhhhh I've been looking for one of those too! *impatiently clicks to RH shop to look for said awesome tool*
ReplyDeleteUgh, isn't that how it always is?? Subscriptions are both wonderful and terrible, for the same reasons: they're awesome deals, and you never know what you'll get! As you'll see, Rainbow Honey just restocked the mystery bags on Monday, so you're in luck! Incidentally, with the subscription do you find that the shipment comes fairly quickly? I like to use the mystery bags toward a $50 purchase, so that I can review the limited editions as well, but unfortunately as you can see from the belated date of this review it seems we get shipped out later, sometimes quite a bit later :( It was SO HARD for me to not peek this month.
DeleteYes, I remember for subscriptions the bags would ship out within the first 10 days of the month and find its way to my door just two days after that. And for nail polish that's wicked fast! I haven't tried getting a free one with an order yet,mostly because I know I'd load up my cart in a heartbeat then wonder where all my money went, but I'd be pretty impatient too if I had to wait this long! Ahh, I must close the site like NOW before I start spending $$$! I love love love their toppers, I'm wearing Poffin Party right now and my nails look so cheery!
Delete